Everyone in my Cohort Quit Within the First 3 Months - Global Teams Manager Crossover for Work Employee Review

1.0
16 Jan 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

They pay you what they say they will...but they also make it very difficult to make your full salary and provide 0 benefits so the salary is not worth taking the job.

Cons

When I took the job as a GTM at Crossover, I was led to believe that the company had set out to be a positive agent to make an impact on the lives of those abroad by giving them stable, white-collar jobs at a salary above market rate from their home countries. I immediately realized that Crossover was falsely advertised–that the ever-distant pursuit of continual increased performance returns came at the expense of people’s livelihood–both of those who I managed and my fellow Stanford hires. I really enjoyed working with these people, and I saw each of them as an important person rather than a performance number. Crossover guarantees no job security, and fosters no trust–the requirement for constant screenshot oversight ensures that culture from the onset. This oversight was carefully concealed in the marketing of Crossover to Stanford students, and I felt deceived once I learned about Worksmart and the nature of the company after starting. Specific feedback about Crossover: - I was hired to manage non-technical teams, and I was placed in charge of engineers. - Productivity does not always have to be beaten out of people with increased oversight. If you create a company culture where people want to do their best out of desire to see the company succeed, the job will still get done and real transparency can be established. - They need to re-evaluate the way they measure metrics. All teams cannot fit into a simple metric, and all teams do not necessarily need much rigid structure to succeed. - They disguise a complete disregard for industry experience and knowledge under the pretense of looking for people who are “young and hungry”. Hiring people who are “young and hungry” is important, but people with no experience or proper knowledge should not be running the organization. - It is not right or smart to encourage people to perform by threatening their job security. - There was a complete lack of structure in their "training", it was so disorganized because of a lack of time invested.

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Crossover for Work Response
9y
Hi - this is Andy Tryba (CEO of Crossover). Sorry that you had this experience - and it's certainly my fault that the latest Stanford cohort we recruited didn't work out - I take full accountability for that. The desire was to hire inexperienced but quick learner/bright folks and teach them how to manage global teams. The theory was rather than hire experienced managers and make them 'forget bad management habits and do ours' - to start from a set of folks that had never managed and have a 'clean slate'. This experiment failed - not because of the bright Stanford folks we brought in - but because we didn't train them well enough on what it takes to a) manage people and b) manage global remote people. It's not easy to jump out of school and be thrust into managing teams of people - and certainly not easy to have all those people be all over the world. We were overly aggressive in the timing we expected the Stanford crew to take over the teams and we didn't do a good job of doing management 101 training. As a result - this crew wasn't armed appropriately. We've now shifted from hiring inexperienced folks to hiring experienced managers and teaching our approach to management. Again - my personal apologies that you had this bad experience - I wish we would have done a better job with y'all. But with that said - I am okay with Crossover continuing experiments and failing - that's how we'll continue to get better. Feel free to reach out to me directly if you want to chat.

Explore other reviews about Crossover for Work

5.0
26 Sept 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

great company to work for, salary on time

Cons

Demanding work and expects excellence

2
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Crossover for Work Response
8mo
Glad to hear it’s a great fit and that pay’s been smooth. And yes—the bar is high by design. Thanks for the 5 stars and for leaning into the challenge.
2.0
30 Jul 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Crossover does require work from home. For many, this is a good thing and, for me, helped productivity. The salary is good, but depending upon your country's tax situation it might not be as good as it seems on the surface.

Cons

Where do I start? I tried to be objective with my 2-star rating; Crossover isn't unethical or stealing from their employees or anything like that. However, for a seasoned professional, be warned... I joined in one of the Very High Dollar executive-level positions being driven by their desire to acquire 50+ companies in the near term. I'm in the US. As such (and I knew this going in), the tax consequences for being a contractor are non-trivial. There's also the consideration that you must fund any perks yourself - healthcare, retirement, etc. While the salary is generous enough to do that, it's not as shiny as it seems on the surface. Your mileage may vary depending upon your home country. What I really disliked: Constant tracking/ justification of work stream. Seriously. As others have pointed out, it's difficult to actually *get* credit for a full work week without working extra. Especially in some of the higher-level, more 'creative' positions such as architect, product management, etc. there's minimal or no opportunity to review or think over things. For me, I work in bursts followed by small distractions in which I'm running the problems in the background of my thoughts. A variety of coworkers and management in my history have almost universally commented about the volume of good work I produce. Even my peers at Crossover had no problem with the quantity or quality of my production. However, their tracking software and systems simply don't credit anything other than linear, constant "work". This was bad for me, resulting in me working extra, reworking things as I attempting to change my processes, "faking" it, or simply working longer to attempt to make my hours. I also felt bad for some of the more junior or "factory" positions. It really is tracked by the minute, with lots of incentive to find "problems" with productivity. This is really a thinly-veiled method of wringing blood out of a turnip, by finding flaws or gaps and essentially docking pay. Yeah, the salaries are good but the amount of ancillary work that goes into making "real" hours is awful, and I felt like a chump contributing to it. I had to quit for my sanity.

1585
avatar
Crossover for Work Response
6y
We appreciate your review. Our wages are paid in USD, so it's not going to be as competitive in high tech markets like San Francisco or Boston in the United States where software development is ultra-competitive. However, wages for the same jobs are very competitive in other US cities and outside the US. Sometimes these wages can be 5-6x the local average. Our business model is unique and isn't for everyone. We aren't trying to be like everyone else. The future of work is being redefined. We pride ourselves in being a pioneer in this new paradigm. If you want to know more about this work model, you can read about it here: https://medium.com/@crossoverforwork/the-factory-model-enabling-massive-scale-across-business-functions-98b18ad574f8
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